AvantGarde

If I was asked to describe my internship experience in three words, the words would be “explore”, “learn” and “network”. Having prior work experience in a techno – functional profile, my inclination was always towards the functional aspects of an organization. With zeal to develop my career in functional area, I pursued MBA. IIT Kanpur MBA program is well versed in terms of the diversified subjects taught, the projects and case studies to be delivered, the guidance of alumni and industry experts through talks and presentations. After gathering the knowledge in the campus for one year, it was time to implement it practically through the internship platform. I was more than excited to get into the corporate world and was obliged to get an opportunity to work in one of the BIG FOUR Consulting Firms- “Deloitte Consulting India Pvt. Ltd”.

The Journey

After one day of induction, I reported to my Manager who was handling the project under System Integration. We had a meeting in which he told me the scope of the project, the latest implementation, the type of teams and work associated with them. The client was a Bio-Science player and Deloitte was responsible for upgrading its e-commerce site for the Life Science Research Segment. Moreover, he tried to understand my competencies, academic background, prior work profile, and my expectations with the organization and accordingly found me suitable to work in the Functional Team.

Both the domain (Bio-Sciences) and the platform (e-commerce) were new to me. I went through one week of knowledge transfer session to understand the e-commerce functionality which included features like catalogue management, punch-out, shipping, storing, account handling, price discount models etc. I could relate my theory of B2B and B2C customers here by understanding the leverage given to both of them. Moreover, our project followed Waterfall Model (which I had learnt in college). I was in the functional team which was responsible for designing the gathered business requirement so that the development team could implement it. This role gave me an opportunity to test my communication and coordination skills and improve them. The team wrote the functional requirements and clearly communicated it to the development team and testing team so that they could implement the functionality and write the test cases accordingly. It required a lot of coordination and team work as team was big and implementation was done in sub-modules. To sum up, I was responsible in writing 20% of critical cases.

Apart from the functional implementation, I did e-commerce competitive assessment for Client. I could implement my theoretical knowledge of Financial Management and Marketing Research in doing the e-commerce assessment. Working in the organization, I understood that each business requirement comes with a need and lots of research. Need not just to improve the in house capabilities but also to be at par with the competitors. My managers’ idea behind this activity was to come up with the proposal for further business requirements which could be presented to client. First step was to understand the industry and identify the competitors. I selected few criteria like presence in e-commerce, geographical area of operation dealing in similar products and having similar revenues to identify the competitors by going through their websites and financial statements. I selected a few attributes on the basis of Deloitte’s standard framework and did a qualitative analysis for all the companies. This was done by navigating through the sites and testing for the attributes’ absence/ presence. Then I did a quantitative analysis in which I gave rating to each organization. I presented it to my manager in terms of the SWOT analysis for the client. I used to take continuous feedbacks and suggestions from the manager for further amendments. At last, the work was approved and was ready to be taken to the client.

Learning

The eight weeks of internship in the consulting firm gave me an opportunity to leverage my knowledge in e-commerce and Bio-Science domain and provided me with a few do’s and don’ts for the future. Firstly, I learnt the importance of clear communication internally among the team or with client. It is more important to continually discuss about the expectations with the client/ manager and clarify the doubts rather than working hard on it because at the end what matters is “right work” than “hard work”. Secondly, I learnt the importance of teamwork, networking, coordination and feedback when you are a part of the functional team and acting as a bridge. Third, I learnt to adapt to the culture and people of the organization. Culture made me remember Mr. Nathans’ words and I experienced that words like “employee satisfaction” are not just said but practised in Deloitte. Last and the most important was having an attitude which gave me the capability to get the things done.

“Because management study is all about attitude and leadership”

–

Abha Patankar

M.B.A 2013-2015